CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — HP today announced enhancements to the HP Vertica Analytics Platform, enabling organizations to accelerate business value from a vastly expanded variety of data.

Version 7 of the HP Vertica Analytics Platform, also called HP Vertica Crane, dramatically simplifies the exploration and analysis of semistructured and “dark” data,(1) provides enhanced integration with Hadoop, and offers significant security and performance enhancements.

While organizations recognize the immense potential value in big data, it can be challenging to find patterns in, or explore new forms of, semistructured data such as social media, web logs, sensors and the Internet of Things. These rapidly growing and critically important data types typically require a lengthy process to load into traditional analytics platforms and data warehouses before they can be stored, explored and served, thus remaining “dark” to many organizations.

“Everyone is seeking to gain insight from new forms of data, but legacy products waste resources because of the need to wrestle the data into structured formats,” said Colin Mahony, vice president and general manager, Vertica, HP. “The new capabilities of the HP Vertica Analytics Platform deliver immediate value and rapidly ‘shine a light’ on formerly dark data—unlocking the value hidden in both traditional and emerging forms of big data.”

HP Vertica Crane offers auto-schematization, which eliminates the need for coding-intensive schemas to be defined or applied before the data is loaded for exploration. It also offers “one-click” schema capabilities that allow for schemas to be created and applied as needed for high-performance analytics. This enables analysts, data scientists and business users to explore and visualize information without burdening, or needing to wait for, their IT organizations to use the lengthy and expensive extraction and transformation tools and processes typical with legacy databases and data warehouses.

The HP Vertica Analytics Platform also supports a variety of industry-standard business intelligence and visualization tools. This open approach allows users to deploy many types of high-performance dashboards to visually explore and draw conclusions from data patterns across a full spectrum of structured and semistructured data.

Data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) offers the potential for extraordinary business insight, yet can be challenging and expensive to explore in traditional database platforms. HP Vertica Crane delivers the industry’s most open “SQL-on-Hadoop” capabilities. Unlike other SQL-on-Hadoop solutions, HP Vertica works with major Hadoop distributions, ensuring high-performance analytics across the broadest range of data types and sources.

HP Vertica Crane also supports direct integration with HCatalog, Hadoop’s table and storage management layer. This integration enhances customers’ ability to navigate data in Hadoop and quickly and easily load that data from into the HP Vertica Analytics Platform for high performance analytics.

HP Vertica Crane also enables organizations to:

Extend built-in analytics and leverage existing investments with the new Java software development kit (SDK), adding to the HP Vertica Analytics Platform’s existing support for C/C++ and the R statistical language.

Meet the most stringent data security and compliance requirements with support for the Kerberos network authentication protocol for all HP Vertica database drivers, including the HDFS connector.

(1) Gartner defines dark data as the information assets organizations collect, process and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes (for example, analytics, business relationships and direct monetizing). Similar to dark matter in physics, dark data often comprises most of an organization’s universe of information assets. Thus, organizations often retain dark data for compliance purposes only. Storing and securing data typically incurs more expense (and sometimes greater risk) than value.

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